Abstract: In
the first part of this text, the author attempts to demonstrate that sacral
kingship might, in anthropological terms, be regarded an Elementary Form
of socio-political life; not an autonomous elementary form, but one falling
under the category of rulership. The reference to the anthropological
notion of Elementary Forms renders virtually irrelevant the rigidity with
which categorical distinctions are made between polytheistic and monotheistic
kingship, as well as any civilisational divisions that might be imagined
between Orient and Occident. The second part of the text provides an illustration
of these presuppositions, the author taking several examples from the
history of monarchy both in the Western World and in the Arab World.

I should like to state at the very beginning my conviction
that sacral kingship, in its variety of forms and representations one
of which is monotheistic kingship,

JSRI  No.10 /Spring 2005 p. 133might in anthropological terms be regarded
an Elementary Form of socio-political life: not an autonomous elementary
form, but one falling under the category of rulership, of sovereignty in
the sense given to the term by Georges Dumézil, without this necessarily
entailing the adoption of his trifunctional model which Le Goff saw to be
eminently fitting for medieval Europe. Like all other Elementary Forms for
the representation of human sociality, this is one of an historical, mutable
character which was central to the political and religious life of virtually
all polities  not the least paradigmatic of which is the history of
ancient Egypt  prior to the great transformation that overcame us
all beginning with the seventeenth century. It is an Elementary Form in
which sovereign and deity are related by manners and degrees of identification
and mimesis. At one extremity of this spectrum of possible relations, full
identity ontologically understood is expressed in epiphany, transsubstantiality
and consubstantiality; At the other extremity, the relationship is expressed
in terms of a variety of mimetic strategies comprehended by the figures
of apostolate, prophecy, and priesthood, or by the altogether more nebuluous
and spectral  but nevertheless effective  tropes of representation,
such as "the shadow of God on earth", a trope that goes at least
as far back as the Assyrians and was later to be so important in discourses
on Muslim kingship.

I do not alas have the opportunity
here to discuss why sacral kingship should be such an Elementary Form,
or why Hocart in his famous work was moved to assert that: "We have
no right, in the present state of our knowledge, to assert that the worship
of gods preceded that of kings Perhaps there never were any gods
without kings, or kings without gods"1: This is a matter
that would take us into a discussion of psychoanalytic, social-psychological,
and anthropological theories that recall names such as Sigmund Freud,
Emile Durkheim, Pierre Clastres, René Girard, Rudolf Otto, and
many others. The lack of space here is particularly unfortunate for me,
as I do so much wish to think through that most compelling tautology implied
by Durkheim's (and, before him, Feuerbach's) conception of the sacred
as an irreducible form of societal self-representation2, as
something not amenable to specific formulation apart from its relationship
to its profane contrary, indeed as "a category of the sensibility"
or "a veritably immediate datum of consciousness" 3.
I will therefore have to rest content with asserting that sacral kingship
was a constant motif in all royalist and imperial arrangements that spanned
the entire cumenical expanse of Eurasia from the very dawn of recorded
history until modern times, a vast perspective in which the primitive
republicanist image of Rome or of Athens seems aberrant, paltry and inconsequential,
if indeed this image of republicanist purity, of the splendid childhood
of rational political man, has any historical credibility or verisimilitude.

Before going any further with the comparative perspective,
a few prefatory words on sacrality will nevertheless be in order. Sacrality,
like kingship, expresses principally a relationship articulated in dominant
transcendence; there is a striking degree of resemblance between epithets
applied to Christ and those applied to Hellenistic and Roman emperors,
such as epiphaneia and parousia, with reference to the solemn
arrival of the emperor. Sacrality denotes irreducible removal, a structure
of irreducible polarity and subordination, an hierarchical instance beyond
hierarchy, a self-referential purity beyond purity and impurity as normally
perceived, an irreducible potency (such as the logos) incommensurate with
any gradations of power. Nevertheless, transcendent sacrality may and
often does substantively disseminate lower beings, like kings, or may
cast its potent shadow upon them; it is not, like Aristotles's supreme
being, only a passive instance of self-reflection and self-

JSRI  No.10 /Spring 2005 p. 134referentiality, but is rather related in
dominance in a manner that is rather Platonic, or, better, Neo-Platonic,
acting by energetic emanation. Eliade was perfectly correct in maintaining
that Plato was "the outstanding philosopher" of primitive mentalities,
mentalities which, he proposed, are not confined to so-called primitive
peoples4. From this statement a number of implications may be
drawn, not the least important of which, for my purpose, is that this relationship,
articulated in the transcendent dominance of the sacred, is one in which
the structure of the cosmos, like that of political society under royal
aegis, is articulated by diminishing degrees of mimetic capacity.

I will be more specific. To these diminishing degrees
of mimetic capacity correspond greater degrees of pollution, of adulteration
with materiality, with humanity increasingly more common and soiled. Yet
this structure of continuous passage across degrees and ways of commensurability
 from self-identity through to shadowy reflections, as I indicated
 is nevertheless governed by an irreducible categorical distinction,
indifferently distinguishing, in parallel, God from man and king from
subject, and relating God and king together in a common distinction from
the common run of humanity in such a way that Louis IX of France could
state that "li rois ne tient de nului, fors de Dieu et de lui"5.

I am perhaps anticipating too much by this direct reference
to St. Louis in the thirteenth century, for the complex history of the
relationship between gods and kings is a very long one, and is yet remarkably
constant. This is not a history that I might reasonably hope to sketch
before you on this occasion. What I wish to suggest to you are some considerations
on the constant motifs involved in enunciations about cumenical
sacral kingship, which connect deity and king by relations of emanation,
analogy, genealogy, metonymy, figuration, and apostolate, all of these
involving functional parity between king and god in their common functional
capacity as demiurges of order, cosmic and human. In the mundane world,
this parity realised by mimesis, by rhetorical or substantive participation
in the common terms held by both of them: limitless energy, boundless
majesty, and absolute virtue.

Let it be said at this stage that I have used the word
"enunciations" quite deliberately, as the enunciations of kingship
I have in mind, albeit largely discursive, are also iconographic, ceremonial,
ritual, and magical, all of these equally performing the function of crystallising
royal energy in tangible and transmissible forms, crystallising it in
virtually immobile formal and formulaic moulds, most visible in iconography,
that freeze out history, politics and society and render complete the
impeccability of kingship, immune from pollution, and reflecting it in
the verbal, iconographic, and ceremonial cultivation of the impeccable
majesty attaching to the royal person.

Before I start reviewing some relevant historical material
I should add the following caveats: I do not mean to imply that all enunciations
about kingship are sacral, nor do I by any means wish to imply that all
such enunciations rest by necessity upon the full realisation of the despotic
potential latent to them. Not all impeccable sacred emperors in Baghdad
and Constantinople enjoyed the limitless power or deployed the boundlessness
energy attributed to them, and the heightened hallucinatory character
of enunciations concerning the sublimity of the imperial office did not
often tally with political realities: witness, for instance, the conjunction
of vox dei and vox populi in the acclamation of Byzantine
emperors by their assertive and demanding armies. Witness also the receipt
by overpowering Muslim princes (such as the saljuqs and the Buyids) of
their investiture with almost absolute rule in Baghdad in the course of
humiliating ceremonials before Caliphs dependent upon their

JSRI  No.10 /Spring 2005 p. 135bounty and protection (this might remind
some of us of the relationship at certain points in time between the Basileus
in Constantinople and Bulgarian and Serbian kings, of the conferment upon
Clovis of an honorary Consulate, or of the so-called Donatio Constantini,
only revealed as a fraud by Lorenzo Valla's argument from anachronism during
the Quattrocento). Witness also the conjunction of divine unction and Frankish
esprit de clan in Carolingian coronation ceremonies, and, of course
the deliciously euphemistic vagueness of discourse on the term potestas
ligendi et solvendi, so very important to the central legal conception
Muslim kingship under the name of ahl al-hall wa'l-`aqd, and in all
cases a polite euphemism for king-makers who were by no means always polite
 or consider, indeed, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, reigning
by Grace of God yet entirely subject to her Parliament and Prime Minister.

And finally, the reference to the anthropological
notion of Elementary Forms with which I opened my talk militate against,
and indeed render virtually irrelevant, the habitual rigidity with which
categorical distinctions are made between polytheistic and monotheistic
kingship, and by extension renders generically connected Byzantine, Muslim
and Latin enunciations on sacral kingship, beyond any civilisational divisions
that might be imagined in terms of a totemic geography of Orient and Occident
or of Islam, Orthodoxy, and the West.

***

In close connection with the contention I have just
made about the illusory character of certain categorical distinctions,
arising from institutional academic inertia no less than from ideological
and political exigencies is the main thesis that I wish to propose: Far
from being generically closed in any conceivable manner, monotheistic
kingship in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and beyond, is but a constellation
of specific inflections within the more general phenomenon or Elementary
Form of sacral kingship, just as monotheism is a specific theological
and cultic inflection within the more general Form of the theological,
political and social manifestations of divinity. For it might very well
be asked whether the contrast between monotheism and polytheism is at
all relevant to notions of divinity in general, quite apart from its interest
to dogmatic theology and the history of religions. It might, further,
be maintained that the notion of polytheism itself appears as a polemical
notion arising from monotheistic self-definition, and is of doubtful systematic
and analytical value, just as it could be maintained that there is little
historical force in the deistic notion, much elaborated in the nineteenth
century, that polytheism is a degenerate form of an original monotheism,
or of Hume's theory (later taken up by nineteenth century Muslim reformers
such as Afghani and Muhammad `Abduh) that the history of religions is
one of evolution from polytheism to monotheism6.

Be that as it may, it can be maintained that, in conceptual
terms, transitions from sacral kingship of a polytheistic to one of a
monotheistic profession of faith have generally been fairly smooth at
the conceptual level, and required in general what we might characterise
as adjustments in terms of rhetorical and sometimes institutional transferences.
The christianisation of Germanic or Slavic polities are interesting cases.
Of these one might almost randomly to select for consideration a relatively
simple, local and clannish polity such as that of Anglo-Saxon England,
we would observe a number of patterns supervening in the transition between
pagan and Christian kingship which repeated developments in more complex
and more central polities, most specifically that of the central areas
of late Romanity.

JSRI  No.10 /Spring 2005 p. 136Relationships of filiations as well as transference
of capacity had related the supreme deity to these Germanic kings of England7,
whose authority derived from their being sprung from Woden. Of the eight
Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies that survive, seven record descent from Woden.
With the christianisation of these kingdoms, at least one did not shed these
memories, duly inscribed in an appropriate new register, as Aethelwulf of
Wessex in the ninth century recorded Woden as the sixteenth descendent from
Scalf, son of Noah, born on the Ark during the Deluge, and therefore a collateral
cousin of Jesus Christ himself. In all cases, it seems that the authority
of Christ, like that of kings, was understood as deriving from the force
of descent, he being the Son of God, just as Aethelwulf's authority derived
from his descent, and his status as the kinsman of Jesus, however distant.

Divine capacities were also transferred. God's
charismatic energy, generically a supreme form of pure energy, passed
on to humankind by way of the king's person  miht, craeft,
maegan, corresponding to the xwarra of Irann gods and kings,
often iconographically represented as a rayed nimbus or as a halo, and
occasionally as a hand  was christianised as Grace, which is after
all a manifestation of pure energy. To the heavenly monarchy of God corresponds
the mundane dominion of the king who, like the christian God and like
Woden and his subaltern associates before him, is the possessor, protector,
governor and wielder, dispenser, and gift-giver, capacities altogether
associated with the term frea, used equally for god and for king.
Giftstol was the term used equally for altar and for throne. And
while the Church destroyed the sacrificial king in a sacramental sense,
they dubbed him Christus Domini, the Lord's Anointed.

More complex but conceptually analogous were developments
in more central lands during Late Antiquity. The period witnessed a wholesale
transferrence of the powers and prerogatives of the many pagan gods to
the unique  but nevertheless triune  Christian God and later
to his Muslim cognate Allah, and their subordination under His exclusive
preserve in a universe where they became demons or jinn 
there was never a denial of the existence of these invisible powers, as
any reading of Origen, and after him of Eusebius, Augustine, and other
the Church Fathers, or of the Koran, would make clear. The irreducibility
of the sacred is tidied up in monotheism by the ingathering of divine
functions and energies, hitherto dispersed, and their allocation to one
deity, thereby rendering the irreducibility of divinity indivisible, like
the indivisibility of royal power. This matter is betokened by the transfer
of attributes, epithets and names of energy, majesty, protection, destruction,
and kingship, from one theological universe to another, such as the Greek
translations of the Old Testament, in which Adonai becomes kyrios,
a term used for various deities as well as emperors, and Shaddai becomes
Pantocrator, and El Elyon becomes theos hypsystos, a name
and celestial attribute habitually applied to Zeus8. Similarly,
Christ and, after him, Constantine, took over wholesale the discursive
and some of the iconographikc attributes of Sol Invictus9.
In an analogous continuity of reference to visible and invisible majesty
in transcendence, this theos hypsystos just mentioned became, in
the Koran, al-`Aliy, an exclusive epithet of Allah, as did al-`Aziz and
many other terms derived from names of particular deities and from the
attributes of Ba`l and El in Semitic religions, later being the occasion
for philosophical theologies and theophoric names.

Quite apart from these rhetorical participations and
cultic transferences, it must be stressed that late Roman religions had
a pronounced henotheistic tendency that became, with time, fully-fledged
monotheism under the combined impact of oecumenical empire, Stoic

JSRI  No.10 /Spring 2005 p. 137cosmopolitism and Neo-Platonism. This henotheistic
streak, which was clearly evident in imperial Roman notions of kingship,
can be usefully comprehended under what is called the Orientalism of the
late empire. I hope it will be taken for granted that this Orientalism does
not indicate the degeneration and adulteration of things purely Roman, whatever
these may have been, but that it indicates rather the growth of Rome into
imperial maturity, its de-provincialisation, at a time when the social,
economic and geopolitical centre of gravity of the empire, and ultimately
the imperial residences and the capital itself, moved eastwards. If origins
and influences were to be sought, then these could safely be specified as
the adoption under Hellenistic influence, especially that of the Seleucids,
of imperial norms deriving ultimately from Achamaenean Iran. This is an
influence which was felt quite early: long after the Athenians and the Macedonians
and tyrants of Magna Graecia sought to emulate the political arrangements,
the architecture, the manners of dress, and the pottery of the Achamaenean
satraps in Anatolia; and long after Cyrus had been set up as an exemplary
political figure by Xenophon and after both Plato and Aristotle had praised
the political arrangements of the Iranians and the views of pagan political
thinkers who thought of God on analogy with the King of Kings  long
after these events, late republican Romans came to regard rulers, in the
Seleucid manner, as the law animate, as lex animata or nomos empsychos.
The term was to remain in use well into the Byzantine empire, exemplified
most meaningfully and in complex ways by the imperial lawgivers Theodosius
and Justinian10, and the question of whether the Roman Pope,
as the canonical lawmaker, should not be above the law was to remain with
latin Christianity well into the High Middle Ages. Rulers of imperial Rome
were construed as the mimetic medium of divine virtue and reason; for all
his scepticism about the exhibitionist tendencies and postures of Roman
sovereigns, Plutarch himself construed the just king as eikon theon,
and Eusebius thought God the father to be related to Christ as the Emperor
did to his own icon, an analogy taken up by the Cappadocian Fathers. Similarly,
Philo regarded such a figure of divinity, in the person of Moses, as nomos
empsychos and as o orthos logos11  and I quote
Philo because his enormous influence was of special pertinence to Roman
and early Christian conceptions of monarchy; his idea of cosmocracy and
of the divine election of the Jews was transmuted from an idea restricted
to a tribal collectivity not much interested in it, to an ecumenical and
universalist idea of dominion.

It will have
been noticed that much of the vocabulary thus used to enunciate kingship
is philosophical, and I shall come to this matter presently. Yet there
was a magical and mythological substructure to this philosophical elaboration,
undertaken by figures such as Diotogenes, Stenidas, and Ecphantus, and
in rather more abstract fashion by Themistius and Iamblichus, in terms
of the late Neo-Platonic, late Stoic, and Neo-Pythagorean vocabularies
which constituted the philosophical pillars of the Hellenistic and Roman
worlds. There was a cultic infrastructure connected with the divine philosophical
associations of royalty. Let it be remembered that Alexander sacrificed
to Marduk in Babylon in his capacity as the last Achamaenean emperor and
Apostle of the great deity, and in Egypt to his father Ra`. He was also,
on his mother's side, descended from Poseidon and hence from Chronos himself,
just as Julius Caesar, who set up for himself an empire-wide cult, hailed
from the Iulii, descendants of Romulus, son of Mars: this was a divine
connection so real that some legions of Augustus used missiles which bore
the inscription "Divum Iulium", and defeated enemies were sacrificed
at the altar of Divus Iulius. Not dissimilarly, the Egyptian Ptolemys
were sons and daughters of Horus,

JSRI  No.10 /Spring 2005 p. 138and, following Seleucid practice, from the
death of Augustus in AD 14 to the burial in 337 of Constantine shortly after
his baptism, 36 of 60 Roman emperors were apotheosised, as were many members
of their families. That the emperors Domitian and Diocletian were termed
dominus et deus is entirely characteristic of this mythological and
cultic turn.

The cultic aspect is crucial: imperial
cults  the aversion to which, as is well known, was the litmus-test
for identifying Christians during the various Roman prosecutions 
were instituted to render worshipful homage to the idea of universal empire
personified by the emperor who, well into Byzantine times, sent a representation
of himself or fully expected one to be made available by Roman governors
or provincial citizens, a statue and later an icon, to the provinces in
order to receive homage to his holy person, and by implication to the
universal empire  an instance of civic religion according to Varros's
well-known and analytically most serviceable distinction in Roman religions
between the mythological, the physical, and the civic12. There
is a very complex history of this phenomenon, marked by episodic ebbs
and flown, an effervescent variety of local forms and changes of taste
for the divine among the emperors and the populace of Rome and the provinces,
not the least significant of which was whether emperors regarded themselves
as divine, after the Egyptian and the Seleucid fashion, or simply as sacred
persons apostolically charged by divinity with the affairs of the world,
after the manner generally  but not exclusively  prevalent
among populations and states of the Near East. Whereas Diocletian, for
instance, was dubbed dominus et deus, the Emperor Julian, harking
back no matter how ambiguously to more classical ideas of res publica13,
preferred to declare in his Epistle to the Alexandrians in 362 that the
gods, and above all the great Serapis, had judged fit that he should rule
the world14  and that as a consequence Roman citizens
must surrender to him the power that emerges from them. There is not here
the implication, as with Julian's correspondent Themistius, that the emperor
was of divine origin, and no suggestion, as with Eusebius, that Constantine
was powered by the Holy Spirit.  interestingly enough, the part
of Themistius' Second Epistle concerning the divine origin of the king
is absent from the Arabic translation of this text by Ibn Zur`a (d. 1056)15.
Julian preferred instead a rather more humble, mimetic role with respect
to divinity; as shepherd and father to men, a mere icon of divinity16,
all of these attributes of Christ  though he on other occasions
saw himself as the incarnation of Helios17, an ambivalence
reflecting the incomsummateness of a process as yet incomplete. And while
earlier Pagan thinkers like Celsus had regarded the denial of divine multiplicity
to be an act of sedition because it derogated local gods and, by extension,
Romanity itself, later times saw emperors setting up particular oriental
deities as patrons of themselves and of the empire: Mithras for Diocletian,
Serapis and Mithras for Julian, and Sol Invictus, identified with a variety
of other deities, for a number of others (including Constantine).

Yet beyond this variety, there were elements of unity
of direction, a development at once combined and uneven, which characterises
the majestic swell of Late Antiquity, an emergent unity which calls up
interesting and important questions of periodisation, of delimiting in
a complex way a trés longue durée of the sort proposed
by Jacques Le Goff for the Middle Ages, which I cannot consider at present.
Suffice it to say that Late Antiquity "decanted"  the
expression is Le Goff's18  the various legacies of Antiquity,
Greek, Hellenistic, Roman, and Oriental, all of these most intimately
and inseparably imbricated, and that, in so doing, tidied up the civilised
world of the day in terms of the immanent trends, all in

We
have available important studies of the conjunction between these three
components, monotheism, absolutism, and universalism, most notably the
older study of Erik Peterson19 and the recent work of Garth
Fowden20. Quite apart from any imputation of causality between
monotheism and universalism, which Fowden21 has denied with
reference to the restricted tribal polities of the Israelites, it is important
to signal that the trend towards universalism, syncretistic or homogenising,
is evident from the long history of attempts to set up universal empires
 first by Cyrus, followed rather inconclusively by Alexander, on
to the Romans following the pax augusti and continuing in claims
to universality by the Byzantines and their tributaries and successors
(copied in the West by ideas of the Holy Roman Empire and notions of translatio
imperii), and reaching perhaps its most stupendous success under the
Caliphate, which combined the geopolitical achievement of Cyrus with Constantine's
dream of universal monotheism22.

Questions of causality apart, there can be little doubt
that the crystallisation and the pervasive accentuation of divine kingship
was closely allied to the universalist vocation of empire  what
I have called the de-provincialisation of Rome  and that both were
to a very large extent premised on a number of allied developments relative
to the centralisation of provincial rule, the atrophy of civic structures
and of evgeretism, and the ethnically and culturally homogenising policies
of the empire, most saliently under the Antonines and the Severans. These
processes ran parallel, and were always gradual: it is not often not often
enough appreciated that Constantine was worshipped in his own lifetime,
and addressed as theos in his new capital, or that in the fifth
century Theodosius still set up flamines to his own cult in the
provinces  the cult of the emperor was only brought to an official
end under Valentinian23  and that overall polytheism
and monotheism had boundaries that were altogether porous. Both were elaborated
in terms of a subordanionist theology that subjected local deities to
a supreme deity, such as Jupiter, Sol, Serapis, or Mithras, local deities
being represented by Celsus, for instance, as satraps of the supreme deity24.
In all, the coherence of the political tradition built around the cult
of emperors gradually gave away to a coherence emerging from confessional
religions, in such a way that ritual coherence gave way gradually to a
textual, scriptural coherence. We should not underestimate the great moment
of subordinationism with respect to the Emperor's standing relative to
Christ: that he is Christ's figure rather than his epiphany, or that he
is the dynamis of the Holy Spirit, is a serious matter which requires
close anthropological and historical consideration which I cannot initiate
now.

The central figure in this development was of course
Eusebius25, Bishop of Caesarea and Constantine's political
theologian, whose thinking on matters that follow was to exercise important
influences in both east (on John Chrisostom, among others) and west (on
St. Ambrose)26. Building at once on early patristic, late-Neoplatonic
subordinationist metaphysics (corresponding to Varro's "physical"
religion), on Biblical exegesis and most particularly on Origen's reclamation
of Romanity in the context of salvation history (this was later expressed
by Augustine in the West27, in his conception of Rome as the
Second Babylon, thus forming the centrepiece of God's design to conquer
the world through her, and transposed by his acolyte Orosius28
into a veritable theology of history, in a line that continues on to John
of Salisbury29 and to Dante 30), and finally on
the willingness of the Church Fathers such as John Chrisostom "unblushingly"31
to place the emperor in the worldly role of God himself, once the empire
ap

JSRI  No.10 /Spring 2005 p. 140peared to have been won for Christianity.
The result was the continuous claim on history for Christian typology, in
which history "lapped over"32 into political philosophy,
and a conception of the emperor set in an universal and indeed a cosmic
hierarchy premised on the transcendent and incommensurable removal of its
apex  Christ the Pantocrator and his worldly analogue the Emperor,
the earthly Autokrator  from what lies beneath. Both are equally participants,
rhetorically and without regard to the dogmatic distinction between the
two, in the common terms of energy and majesty, and both mirror each other
in upholding the principle of monarchy: to the one monarch on earth corresponds
the one monarch in heaven, an idea that was to be ceaselessly repeated alike
by Byzantine and Muslim writers on politics. One medieval Muslim theologian
indeed suggested that the best proof for the unicity of God was to be had
by analogy with the uniqueness of worldly kingship33.

Cosmic and wordly monarchy as the contraries
of divine and political polyarchy34 corresponds entirely in
this scheme. But this very scheme in its monotheistic inflection renders
doctrinally very difficult the identification of imperial monarchy with
divinity or the consubstantiality of kingship with divinity. The quasi-divinisation
of Byzantine emperors was attenuated and ritualised35, being
converted into sanctity, and what remain of such divinisation are figures,
eikones, figures no less real and absolutist for being virtual:
figures of mimesis, of emanation, of typology, and of magical contiguity
between emperor and cosmocrator. I have already stated that what remains
was rhetorical participation; and if we exclude Neo-Platonic elaborations
of the imperial office by Eusebius, most particularly in his TricennialOrations (esp. part 1), in terms of emanation from the divine logos,
we are left only with figuration in which that which is doctrinally and
theologically unthinkable and inexpressible is enunciated: this is figuration
which acquires reality by repetition rather than through the theological
justification which is barred to it, a figuration whose force derives
from the illocutionary energy acquired as language, highly formalised
and allusive in instances such as this, is subjected to a diminution in
propositional energy which is theologically beyond it.

I entirely agree with Gilbert Dagron's statement that,
for Oriental Christians, sacerdotal royalty was neither an idea nor a
theory, but rather a figure36 : the emperor as the ritual figure
of Christomimesis, whose sites were iconography, ceremonial, metaphor
and political etiquette, which enunciated the rhetorical participation
of Christ and of the emperor in the common terms of energy and majesty,
yielding a field of magical contiguity and the transferrence within this
field of efficacious grace from God to the emperor. This was expressed
in the conferment upon the Basileus of the epithet hiereus by the
Synod of Constantinople in 449 and the Council of Chalcedon in 45137,
and the application of the qualifier théos to all matters
that pertained to the person of the emperor38, including his
icon, which is after all related to him in very much the same way as he
related to God the Son, by figuration and magical participation39.
Thus the wide range of other qualifiers studied by Otto Treitinger40:
that the emperor is the like of God "in so far as this possible",
that he is an emanation of the Trinity, the Trinity's elect, king in God
and in Christ the eternal king. Thus also is the plastic extension of
the emperor's mystical  indeed, mystagogic41  personality,
as frozen in ceremonial postures and mimetic tropes well studied by André
Grabar42. And thus finally, by plausible magical exaggeration,
was the divine unction received by the porphyrogennetoi while still
in their mothers' wombs43 : magical exaggeration, but also
a typological variation on the theme of the Immaculate Conception; it
must not be forgotten that the kings of France from Clovis onwards were
anointed with holy oil contained

JSRI  No.10 /Spring 2005 p. 141within a phial delivered to St. Remy by
no less a being than the Holy Spirit, and that later the Virgin herself
was to deliver holy oil to Thomas à Becket for the anointment of
English kings44.

The imitation of
Christ of which I have been speaking was not confined to mysteries, but
extended to the very real ecumenical order whose lynch-pin was the Emperor,
calling up, again typologically, the hierarchical order by means of which
the cosmocrator orders the universe, just as ancient deities imposed order
upon primordial chaos. The Emperor establishes and maintains taxiarchia,
proper order, ritual and otherwise, in state, society, church and army45.
This order, as I have suggested, is located in the irreducible difference
and generic disparity between God and man as between Emperor and his subjects,
premised on a simple structure of subordination and superordination. It
is as if subjects were enculturated by the presence of the king who, with
his capacity for violence (and violence, as we learn from Augustine most
especially, is a primary instrument for the imitation of Christ 46)
, alone remains within the realm of nature and outside the compass of
culture which is guaranteed by his presence. Order is conceived after
a Neo-Platonic fashion, in which hierarchy is presided over by an imperturable
instance removed from it generically, in self-referential sacrality, energy
in a state of pristine purity, beyond refrain or reciprocity yet regulative
of all recall and reciprocity that create culture, marshalled by Christ
and Emperor for the greater glory of God.

Last but not least, this charter for absolutism, often
surreal and hallucinatory, was as I suggested wedded to a theology of
history. Typology is not only a discursive device in which allegory moves
along the axis of time, but also an intimation of magical participation,
as with the icon, where the figure conjures up the presence of the type.
It was not only deployed to figure Christ, but to figure also the dominion
of Christ in the context of a salvation-historical scheme. In this scheme,
imperial Romanity was the universal premise of salvation within historical
time. Byzantine as well as western emperors figured not only the timelessness
of Christ, but the pre-history and history of his dominions. They were
inheritors not only of the pax augusti, but also of veterotestamental
kings47, just as the Crusaders too were to see themselves as
the true Israelites48, and as the Church was the legatee and
indeed the typological re-enactment of Noah's arc  although, as
is very well known, conditions differed between Orthodoxy and Latinity
on this score. Constantine was a Second David and Augustus, and several
later Byzantine emperors were called a Second Constantine  similarly,
Constantine's new capital was a Second Rome, and a Third was later to
be declared in Moscow.

Without going into the vexed question of so-called Caesaropapism,
the net result of the differences to which I have just hinted between
ecclesiastical arrangements of the Orthodox and Latin churches, was that
the separation in the West of Church and state, which led to the creation
of an impuissant theocracy, while in Orthodoxy the unity of church and
empire led to the history of a somewhat less interesting "war of
positions" 49. The continuous assertion of the transcendent
status of the emperor was perhaps most acutely expressed when, after the
fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Sultan received
the monk Gennadius in audience and granted him the insignia of the patriarchal
office, including his staff and pectoral cross50  while
the Sultan, though styling himself Caesar of the Romans, was not in a
position to have himself anointed by the patriarch, and would not have
wished to have arrogated to himself the sacerdotal aspect of the Basileus
(which was achieved by at least one Crusader king of Constantinople),
he was still the instance in political control of the Orthodox

JSRI  No.10 /Spring 2005 p. 142church, a fact which led to the emergence
of Orthodox autocephaly everywhere. That apart, time permits me to add only
that the sacrality of medieval western kings and emperors was rarely formalised
and infrequently ritualised, but was rather diffused, with variations over
time, in a setting of sacrality which englobed these kings functionally
51, rather than being determined by their own sacral person,
a situation which allowed the popes to have an aggressively profane notion
of kingship. And though the basic flaw of the papal theory was that no pope
managed to find "an emperor who would accept the subordinate role devised
for him"52, the relationship was managed by piecemeal rapprochements
until the central part of the Middle Ages, when as the Sacerdotium
acquired a decided "imperial appearance", the regnum managed
to acquire only "a clerical touch" 53.

So far, I have said precious little about Islam, and I propose to continue
from where I left off with regard to this particular historical experience
of monotheistic kingship. I have already said that the Muslim Caliphal
regime had consummated the universalist trends of Late Antiquity and was
the culmination of its tendential orientation. I have also said that,
apart from the historical discussion, I am dwelling upon the enunciative
form of what I have repeatedly described as an Elementary Form. Comparatism
should be no means be confined to a genetic perspective, although I am
nevertheless insisting that there is no crucial generic differentiation
between Muslim kingship and forms of sacral kingship that preceded it.

The great Franz Cumont once stated that, at the turn
of the fourth century, under the Roman Emperor Galerius whose Irannising
predilections in matters of state were well-known, "ancient Caesarism
founded on the will of the people seemed about to be transformed into
a sort of Caliphate"54. For all its rhetorical flourish,
this is a statement of tremendous suggestiveness: it suggests that, polemics
aside, a certain conceptual continuum relates the Caliphate as a form
of sacral kingship to trends immanent in Late Antiquity which it, in its
own way, completed. This is entirely borne out by history, for it is indeed
a fact that the regime of the classical caliphate recapitulated and accentuated
these trends, forming itself as a specific inflection within them.

What was Islam, after all, but a recovery for monotheism
of the last remaining reservation of ancient paganism, this being the
Arabian peninsula, and most particularly its western part, from whence
the ruling dynasties of the Islamic empire originated? Close scrutiny
of the emergence of Islam will show that it recapitulated in the new linguistic
medium of Arabic, now become a a language of a universal high culture,
the historical processes I have been describing whereby henotheism, subordinationist
theology, and polytheism gave way to a universalist monotheism correlative
with empire. And let it not be supposed that, for all its importance,
it was the Koran that gave rise to the Muslim empires of the Umayyads
of Damascus and the Abbasids of Baghdad: not only because the Koran is
by no means the sum-total of the Muslim canon, and because for generating
a concept of a polity it is but stony ground, but also because the Koran
related to Muslim polities in much the same highly complex way as the
Old and New Testaments related to Christian polities: as a quarry of quotations,
examples, and exegetical occasions for the elaboration of concepts of
public order that do not emerge from the texts, and when they do so, they
do so only partially and to a large extent symbolically and genealogically
(I use the latter term with reference to Pierre Bourdieu). The Koran was
edited during a period which we might call palaeo-Islamic  a period
which, I submit, lasted well into the eighth century, giving Muslim monarchs
the leeway to toy with traditions in place, sometimes with ingenious playfulness,
at a time when they

JSRI  No.10 /Spring 2005 p. 143had found themselves suddenly propelled
to being masters of most of what mattered in the Late Antique world, from
Carcassonne to Tibet, in a period of very rapid transformation, and when
the prospect of conquering Constantinople was still very tangible 
a fact reflected in the rebuilding of the centre of their capital Damascus
in the first half of the eighth century after a manner that resembled, typologically
and hopefully, the centre of Constantinople55.

Very
much in the way we saw Orthodox polities displace matters of enunciating
that which is doctrinally inadmissible for monotheism to the realm of
hyperbole, we find that the relentlessly hubristic enunciations on the
Caliphate find their proper place in the historical analogies and typologies
that we find in historical works, in Belles-Lettres, Fürstenspiegel,
panaegeric poetry, administrative manuals, epistolary and testamentary
literature, coins, and official documents, and certain theological and
philosophical works, no less than in the non-discursive media of ceremonial,
architecture, courtly etiquette, emblematic, and caliphal biographies.

In all, kingship, by which is meant absolutism on analogy
with the exclusive singularity of God in the cosmos and the indivisibility
of His sovereignty, is construed as the form of artificial sociality.
In this, the monarch-Caliph imposes culture, that is to say, order, upon
humans, and maintains this cultural order by resort to instruments of
nature, by the constant use of force and vigilance; for mankind is congenitally
recidivist, always hankering after the war of all against all. This is
generally premised on a pessimistic anthropology, perhaps most eloquently
expressed in the statement by the last Umayyad caliphal secretary Yahya
b. `Abd al-Hamîd al-Katib in the middle of the eighth century, that
"evil inheres in men as fire inheres in a flint-stone". Kingship
 and prophecy  are the corrective. Like God, kings and prophets
stand at the apex of a hierarchy of the Neo-Platonic type, of which they
form no part, with respect to which they are transcendent, and with which
they stand in no reciprocity, for without absolute monarchy only chaos
is conceivable. This theme of the Caliph as the demiurge of sociality
 of culture  was particularly accentuated in Muslim discourses.
The Caliph's transcendence figures as an energy yielding a force which
acts, by the violent means of nature, upon human nature in order to produce
culture, but yet remains beyond this culture as a reserve of untrammelled
nature ever producing and maintaining culture: The Caliph is the untameable
tamer and the savage domesticator, continuously exercising the corrective
primal violence with which chaos was subdued in primeval times, rather
more in the mood of the Enuma Elish than that of Greek myths of
creation. . This is reflected in the caprice of the Caliph and the precariousness
of life around him  a caprice and a precariousness which repeat
the transcendentally narcissistic amorality of the supreme Koranic and
Old Testamental deity.

The Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad, after the earliest
period of their rule, enhanced the illocutionary power of this description
by their absence, for they virtually never appeared in public, and remained
instead in the fastness of their palaces, from whence they radiated the
invisible sacredness and terrible energy of majesty, and within which
they instituted palatine ceremonial of consummate elaborateness, splendour
and solemnity, visually as grandiloquent as any ceremonial seen in Connstantinople,
and on occasion in deliberate competition with it  let us not forget
the transplantation of many palatine and even bourgeois conventions and
manners of dress and sumptuousness from Baghdad to Byzantium. The caliphal
presence was often qualified as muqaddas, sacred, and called the
Second Ka`ba; the Caliph's face, rarely seen except by his private entourage,
was very often qualified as luminous, in line with

The Caliph's palatine
compounds were often treated as safe havens for lives and treasures in
times of trouble, and Caliph's tombs in Baghdad were often venerated.
Other magical and typological motifs abounded plentifully, for the caliphate
was also the custodian of holy relics: the chosen ceremonial colour of
the `Abbasid Caliphs, black, supposedly the Prophet's, was the colour
ceremonially worn by all public officials, and figured the Caliphate against
the grain on their skin, with the difference that certain tissues were
reserved for the Caliphs, as was red footwear. When Ibn Fadlan visited
the Bulgars at the Volga Bend in the middle of the ninth century to forge
an alliance against the Khazars, the Bulgar chief prostrated himself before
the black cloak sent him from Baghdad, as did Saladin in Cairo more than
three centuries later  just as they would, according to custom,
have prostrated themselves before the Caliph's person, and just as Byzantines
would have performed proskynesis before the imperial person and
his icon. When in audience, the Caliphs from an uncertain and fairly late
date would wear the Prophet Muhammad's Cloak (recently worn by Mullah
Omar in Afghanistan  how it might have got to Central Asia I have
no way of telling), and had beside them Muhammad's staff and before them
the Koranic codex of `Uthman, the third Caliph in succession to Muhammad
 the Prophet's standard only surfaced in the sixteenth century,
having been bought by the Ottomans in a Damascus market, and was for the
first time displayed during a military campaign in Hungary. Ground on
which Caliphs sat was hallowed, and letters received from them were boiled
and the revolting liquid drunk, as it brought the drinker the Caliph's
baraka, the benign Fortuna he commanded which, unlike the
Roman fortuna augusti, had no cultic structure. Indeed, the pleasure
and justice of the Caliph caused prosperity and plenty, by magical means
quite apart from socio-economic considerations.

The Caliphate is therefore an almost primordial office,
inscribing itself in a universal history of typology, and this is where
political theory and historical theology meet. Adam was, according to
the Koran, God's first Caliph (khalîfa) on earth  his
vicar, apostle, viceregent, legatee, and successor, if such could be conceived;
he was, in sum, his figure. The Baghdad Caliphs like those before them
were God's Caliphs as well as Caliphs of Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets
who inaugurated the last, universal phase in the history of the world.
This history was regarded by Muslims generally as a vast typological drama
in which Muhammad recapitulates all previous prophecies and polities and
restores them to the original and pristine condition of that primordial
religion which is Islam (echoes here of a tradition identified with Origen
and Eusebius, but also with Late Antique notions of a Perennial Philosophy).

It is in one particular consequence of this double
capacity that the distinctiveness of this Muslim inflection of monotheistic
kingship lies: Caliphs were, first of all, instances of mimesis of the
divine in their constitutive and preservative capacities and figures thereof,
in the indivisible nature of their sovereignty. They are Caliphs of Muhammad
in that they figure, in time, both his universalist historical enterprise
and his election, which allows for the transmission of charisma through
a dynastic line related to him by blood. Muslim Kingship in its Caliphal
form represents God therefore at once directly and through the historical
mediation of the Muhammadan fact  a fact both of historical theology
and of dynastic genealogy. Unlike Byzantium, this is an election 
and I remind you here of the in vitro unction of porphyrogennetoi
 which does not involve the insinuation of the Holy Spirit into
the bodies of unsuspecting empresses, although the mythological register
takes a

JSRI  No.10 /Spring 2005 145more ebullient form among the Fatimid Caliphs
of Egypt and Syria (10th-12th centuries). They believed that members of
their dynastic line had pre-existed the creation of the world, in spectral
form in which they persisted until the arrival of the appointed time for
their successive personal incarnations as Caliphs. The Twelver Shi`ites
supposed that the seeds of their individual Imams had been physically extracted
from Adam's body by God before time itself was created.

Last
but not least  and this, as a totalising historical tendency, is
the crux of the distinctiveness that I should like to convey to you, though
in many disparate and unarticulated details many of its elements bear
comparison with Byzantine kingship  the Caliphs were Muhammad's
Caliphs in that they invigilated the application of his new dispensation,
his sharî`a, which incidentally renders all thought of kings
as lex animata inconceivable (except among the Fatimids). Muhammad
is a universal historical figure not only because he completed the great
universal cycle of prophecy, but because in so doing he at once absorbed
and elevated prophetic history to its Adamic and Abrahamic beginnings.

I have said that the distinctiveness of the Caliphate
within the possible structures of monotheistic kingship resided in the
concomitance of both a direct and timeless relationship to God, and a
relationship historically mediated through Muhammad, and that with respect
to the latter, the Caliph was the guardian in his own time of Muhammad's
dispensation. It was this last tendency that was accentuated with time,
and most particularly with the extinction of the `Abbadids after seven
hundred years of continuous rule of varying power and extent, with the
destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 and the execution of the
last Caliph. This nomocratic trend had existed for a long time among pietistic
and legalistic circles which were resistant the sacral pretensions of
the Caliphate.

Along with the rise of these circles into prominence
as the Muslim priesthood  and I use the term `priesthood" advisedly,
in a sociological and not in a sacramental sense, although Muslim priests
are of course also involved in practices of magical healing and mediation
between individual and God and indeed of a logocratic sacramentalism,
the Word of God being to them the only authentic sacrament  this
priesthood acquired a strong institutional consistency from around the
twelfth century, when the central lands of Islam were overcome with secular
kingship, with so-called sultanism, which granted considerable independence
in matters of doctrine, including doctrines of legal order, to this priestly
corporation, to this "sodality' in the Weberian sense of the term.
One very important result was that the three components of classical Muslim
enunciations of kingship diverged: while these had previously been sited
as contiguous discourses in the same courtly milieu, they now took over
different institutional sites, with the Sultans being given many of the
worldly prerogatives of the Caliphate, and several of their metaphorical
connections with divinity as well, in a form that was highly attenuated
in comparison with what had been the Caliphs': they were shadows of God
and preserving energies, but not in general sacred presences. The prerogative
of figuring the Prophet and his nomocratic dispensation, on the other
hand, fell upon the priestly corporation, in conjunction with which the
cult of the Prophet itself was royalised from the twelfth century onwards.
With the displacement of Caliphal charisma to the priestly corporation
and its endowment with the legalistic form of the sharî`a, came
also the displacement of this royalist charisma exclusively to the equally
absent figure of the Prophet, wherein resided henceforth the Elementary
Form of sacral kingship. And whereas previously the Caliphate was a technical
legal distinction within the larger concept of kingship, kingship 
sultanism  was now

JSRI  No.10 /Spring 2005 p. 146shorn of the mimetic and genealogical prerogatives
of the Caliphate. What emerged discursively after this dispersion of royalist
charisma was a genre of priestly writing on politics called siyasa shar`îya,
a form of legal and scripturalist writing on politics that came into its
own in the thirteenth century, the outstanding European analogue to which
is Bossuet's Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Ecriture
Sainte some four centuries later.

What
I outlined just now corresponds more or less to the picture commonly held
of Muslim public order and of its Levitical legalism. But this, as I hope
to have shown, was a development that required several centuries in order
to detach itself from the heritage of Late Antique kingship, and, in the
same movement, from sacral kingship itself, now transformed into a heathenish
veneration of sheer sultanic power. It is this end-result which is probably
most present to minds of readers today. Yet in all cases, a profound continuity
persisted, and I can do no better than quote the great philosopher, theologian
and astronomer Nasir al-Din Tusi, advisor to Hülegü during the
siege and sack of Baghdad in 1258, speaking of the person who directs
the affairs of the world with divine support: "Such a person",
he said, in the terminology of the Ancients, was called Absolute King
[al-mata` al-mutlaq: autokrator] ... the Moderns refer to
him as the imam ....Plato calls him Regulator of the World [al-mudabbir:
oikonomos/hegemon"]56.

22 One scholar only has noted similarities
between Byzantine and Muslim notions relative to this and some related
questions: A. Vasiliev, "Medieval Ideas of the End of the World:
West and East", in Byzantion, XVI/2 (1942-43), pp. 462-502;
See in general G. Podskalsky, Die Byzantinische Reichsideologie: Die
Periodisierung der Weltgeschichte in den vier Grossreichen und dem tausendjährigen
Friedensreiche, Munich, 1972

23 See for instance: G. Bowersock, `Polytheism
and Monotheism in Arabia and the Three Palestines', in Dumbarton Oaks
Papers, 1997, 4 ff; Cameron, Later Roman Empire, 124 ff.

39 Among others, St. John of Damascus,
On the Divine Images. Three Apologies against Those who attack the Divine
Images, tr. David Anderson, Crestwood, N. Y., St. Vladimir's Seminary
Press, 1980, passim